Chapters 1–2

Summary—Chapter 1: The Prison-Door

This first chapter contains little in the way of action,
instead setting the scene and introducing the first of many symbols
that will come to dominate the story. A crowd of somber, dreary-looking
people has gathered outside the door of a prison in seventeenth-century Boston.
The building’s heavy oak door is studded with iron spikes, and the
prison appears to have been constructed to hold dangerous criminals.
No matter how optimistic the founders of new colonies may be, the
narrator tells us, they invariably provide for a prison and a cemetery
almost immediately. This is true of the citizens of Boston, who
built their prison some twenty years earlier.

The one incongruity in the otherwise drab scene is the
rosebush that grows next to the prison door. The narrator suggests
that it offers a reminder of Nature’s kindness to the condemned;
for his tale, he says, it will provide either a “sweet moral blossom”
or else some relief in the face of unrelenting sorrow and gloom.

Summary—Chapter 2: The Market-Place

As the crowd watches, Hester Prynne, a young woman holding
an infant, emerges from the prison door and makes her way to a scaffold
(a raised platform), where she is to be publicly condemned. The women
in the crowd make disparaging comments about Hester; they particularly
criticize her for the ornateness of the embroidered badge on her
chest—a letter “A” stitched in gold and scarlet. From the women’s
conversation and Hester’s reminiscences as she walks through the
crowd, we can deduce that she has committed adultery and has borne
an illegitimate child, and that the “A” on her dress stands for
“Adulterer.”

The beadle calls Hester forth. Children taunt her and
adults stare. Scenes from Hester’s earlier life flash through her
mind: she sees her parents standing before their home in
rural England, then she sees a “misshapen” scholar, much older than
herself, whom she married and followed to continental Europe. But
now the present floods in upon her, and she inadvertently squeezes
the infant in her arms, causing it to cry out. She regards her current
fate with disbelief.

Analysis—Chapters 1–2

These chapters introduce the reader to Hester Prynne and
begin to explore the theme of sin, along with its connection to
knowledge and social order. The chapters’ use of symbols, as well
as their depiction of the political reality of Hester Prynne’s world,
testify to the contradictions inherent in Puritan society. This
is a world that has already “fallen,” that already knows sin: the
colonists are quick to establish a prison and a cemetery
in their “Utopia,” for they know that misbehavior, evil, and death
are unavoidable. This belief fits into the larger Puritan doctrine,
which puts heavy emphasis on the idea of original sin—the notion
that all people are born sinners because of the initial transgressions
of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

But the images of the chapters—the public gatherings at
the prison and at the scaffold, both of which are located in central
common spaces—also speak to another Puritan belief: the belief that
sin not only permeates our world but that it should be actively
sought out and exposed so that it can be punished publicly. The
beadle reinforces this belief when he calls for a “blessing on the
righteous Colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged
out into the sunshine.” His smug self-righteousness suggests that
Hester’s persecution is fueled by more than the villagers’ quest
for virtue. While exposing sin is meant to help the sinner and provide
an example for others, such exposure does more than merely protect
the community. Indeed, Hester becomes a scapegoat, and the public
nature of her punishment makes her an object for voyeuristic contemplation; it
also gives the townspeople, particularly the women, a chance to demonstrate—or
convince themselves of—their own piety by condemning her as loudly
as possible. Rather than seeing their own potential sinfulness in
Hester, the townspeople see her as someone whose transgressions
outweigh and obliterate their own errors.